Well, after going through it. I'm not sure what is correct, at the moment. But the last quote sums it up.
"The process begins with brine entering the evaporation ponds whereby water is removed by solarevaporation. This causes gypsum, halite and astrakainite to crystallise sequentially in the first twosets of ponds."
But everything else points to.
"The SOP plant converts the mixed salt into schoenite and halite through mixing with water andinternal recycling of the brines. The resultant slurry is processed through reverse flotation to removethe halite, the resultant schoenite salts are decomposed into SOP. The halite is discarded to tailingsunless otherwise economical to recover."
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"Resource Low Na:K Ratio 8.9 : 1"
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"Conversion of potash salts to raw schoenite – The crushed, mixed salts are mixed withcooled SOP mother liquor causing conversion of the mixed salts to schoenite. After conversion,the schoenite will crystallize separately from halite allowing the separation of the salts fromeach other.
Flotation of schoenite – The schoenite slurry undergoes conditioning before direct flotation inflotation cells. Halite tailings are discarded during this process step and primary schoenite isrecovered. By floating the schoenite, the concentration of halite in potassium bearing salts willbe reduced to approximately 10% of its original concentration. Seperation of flotation liquor andprimary schoenite is performed by centrifuges."
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More importantly: It is 14.5% at best. Not including plant handling losses.
"• Importantly the harvested potassium salts contain ~7.5% K2O, accordingly, to achieve 1tonne of SOP product requires ~7 tonnes of harvested mixed potassium salts which arethen treated in the purification plant to remove residual sodium, magnesium and chloridesalts;"
Which ever way you want to slice it, a recovery of 780t of 40,000t is not 80% or even 20%. It's 1.9%
